As an English teacher, one of my main goals is for my students to become better readers. I've been doing this job for twenty years now, and I have read lots of books and articles about it, and I have tried to figure out how to help students become better readers, and it is truly surprising to me that there is not a clearer consensus about what works best. But there isn't consensus, and as far as I can tell that is because there is no really clear evidence showing that if you do X in your class or in your school, rather than Y, kids will be better at reading.
Like everyone, I have my opinions about what should work, and yet I have to acknowledge that there is the evidence is not very strong that my preferred approach is better than other people's preferred approaches. This uncertainty and lack of clear evidence in support of one approach is in a sense not that surprising, since it's true in a lot of other social science fields (for example, people argue about whether, if you want to win an election, you should spend your money on door-to-door canvassing or on TV ads), and it's easy to imagine reasons for this uncertainty. But at the same time, it is truly remarkable that even in the face of such uncertainty about the best way to proceed, people still, including me, get into highly charged debates about how schools should teach reading. And we all believe our approach is, not only the best, but also is supported by solid evidence.
Some approaches people wrongly claim there is clear unambiguous evidence for
I have seen arguments for each of these saying that there is clear evidence that it works better than current practice at improving reading comprehension:
a) Lots of free voluntary reading (this is my preference, and scholars like Krashen and Allington have made the case, but the evidence is, I have to admit, not as strong as I would expect. Krashen's go-to stat is that in 51/54 studies, FVR does "as well as or better than" comparison programs; I'd like 54/54 to show it's better!)
b) Explicit vocabulary instruction (this is often, as in the What Works Clearinghouse's advice on improving adolescent literacy, the very first recommendation, and yet to me the evidence seems weak that explicit vocabulary instruction is any better than just reading and learning words incidentally as you read. People often cite studies showing that if you teach kids key words from a passage beforehand, they will do better at reading the passage--but that seems obvious!)
c) Reading non-fiction (the Common Core made this a key feature of its standards, and prominent scholars like Tim Shanahan and Nell Duke have argued that evidence shows that being assigned more non-fiction will make you better at reading non-fiction. This sounds reasonable, but last I checked there was no evidence for it.)
d) Instruction in reading strategies (Metacognition, using prior knowledge, making predictions, asking questions, identifying the main idea--teachers are told that explicit instruction in these "strategies" will help their students become better readers, but the evidence for this is pretty thin. Natalie Wexler has a lot of fun skewering reading strategy instruction in her book, The Knowledge Gap.)
e) Instruction in content knowledge (Natalie Wexler's sharply written book argues, I think correctly, that instruction in reading strategies is mostly useless and argues that what we need instead is to teach facts and content; unfortunately, the evidence for more instruction in content knowledge is not great either. Among other things, there are whole schools devoted to E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge approach, and as far as I can tell they do not get significantly better reading achievement outcomes.)
f) Systematic phonics instruction, aka the "Science of Reading" (Many people claim that our early grade literacy instruction is outrageously ineffective, is dooming many students to failure, and is a leading social justice issue. And yet, here as in the other examples, including my own pet theory that children should be spend much more in-school time reading books, there is, to my knowledge, no really clear evidence yet of a school or district adopting this practice and obtaining dramatically different results from those of other schools or districts. I am still looking into this question, and there's a chance I'm missing something, but so far it looks a lot like it follows the same pattern as these other approaches.)
Pointing out that someone's evidence is thin is not a way to win friends
By now, I have a lot of experience, in blogs, in person, and on twitter, with asking for good evidence that a particular approach works. It usually follows the same pattern as my remarkable exchange with Tim Shanahan about non-fiction several years ago, or , more recently, of my Twitter exchanges with some education professors about vocabulary or with Natalie Wexler about content.
Shanahan had written on his blog that kids should read more non-fiction. I said that I wanted to see evidence, and he said:
"Actually there is quite a bit of research showing that if you want students to be able to read expository text, you have to have them read (or write) expository text."
When I suggested that there wasn't great evidence, he responded, with admirable candor:
"You are correct that there is no study showing that increasing the amount of the reading of informational text has had a clear positive unambiguous impact on reading achievement or student knowledge. "
I still don't get why he and Nell Duke were claiming that there was a lot of good evidence for reading non-fiction, when the only evidence I ever found was against it, but what he was doing is pretty common. People often make exaggerated claims about their preferred curriculum or instructional approach. This makes sense: there's a lot of upside to exaggerated claims about data and evidence, and extremely little downside, since editors and readers don't seem to push back very hard. In fact, I often get the feeling that I am considered rude for pointing out that the evidence is weak. After seeming to admit that I was right and he had been wrong to claim that there was good evidence to back up his claim, Tim Shanahan told me that I didn't understand how research worked or how causal claims were put forward. By that I now think he maybe meant that everyone knows that there's no "clear positive unambiguous evidence" for any particular approach to reading. I just think he's wrong--everyone definitely does not know this--and I am still trying to make sense of this fact myself.
Why don't any of these new approaches yield dramatically different results in the real world?
None of these different approaches seem to make much difference in students' reading abilities--but why not?! It seems to me that a school that builds a strong culture of reading, a school in which students read a lot during school, a school in which they talk about what they read, and read more than students in other schools--it seems to me that such a school should have dramatically better results than comparable schools. And yet the East Side Community School, a wonderful school (with a bad-ass principal) that truly values reading and seems to be doing everything I would want it to, including having its kids read an average of 40 books a year (?!), has test scores that are only somewhat above average. Its test scores are arguably evidence of huge success, given that it has a higher than average number of poor kids, but it isn't totally clear that it's the reading program, rather than the schoolwide culture of caring and engagement or the fact that parents had to apply and send in a letter of interest (which means that its student body is not randomly selected) that leads to the higher than average reading scores. Also, despite the school's apparently amazing culture, its students are still not achieving at the level of a place like Leafstrewn, the district with the most educated parents in the entire country. And the academic literature on what Stephen Krashen calls "Free Voluntary Reading" is pretty good (see his book), but it is not a slam-dunk. I think it's somewhat better than the evidence for the other later-grade approaches I listed above, but I wish it were better. If somebody wanted to argue that my preferred approach didn't have unambiguous empirical evidence, I'd have to agree, just as people like Tim Shanahan admit, when pressed, that their preferred approaches don't have "clear positive unambiguous impacts on student reading achievement." But... why? Why can't we show that any new approach is clearly better than the current practice? The answer, I think, is threefold.
1) Reading is the complex result of many factors
Some of the factors that go into reading skill include: genetic abilities of one kind or another (it seems reasonable to think that there might be some genetic component to a child's verbal aptitude, to their ability to sit and concentrate, to their auditory processing, to their working memory, etc.); the language environment in which a child grows up (conversations with caregivers in early childhood, number of books in the classroom and in the home, examples of literacy in the neighborhood and among peers, traumatic events, etc.); the specific instruction a child receives in grapheme/phoneme relationships; the amount of reading the child does on their own; and probably more.
2) Most of these factors are outside of the purview of school
Children spend far more time outside of school than in it, and even what they do during school hours is largely influenced by their lives outside the schoolhouse. A student's reading ability in 10th grade, or 8th grade, or even 3rd grade, is mostly the result of out-of-school factors. Many of these factors are in place before a student even reaches Kindergarten.
3) Most teachers are trying to do a good job, and the important stuff is pretty obvious
Most teachers are smart, caring people who love their students and want to help their students learn, and most stuff teachers do with kids is basically fine. These preferred strategies are obviously not bad. If you teach them vocab, that's probably good--they're thinking about words! If you teach them reading strategies, that's probably good--they're reading! If you teach them content knowledge, that's probably good--they're thinking about the content you're discussing! If you have them "just read", that's probably good--some of them will actually do it, and reading is very worthwhile! If you teach them phonics, that's probably good--it is true that the relationship between letters and sounds is fundamental!
And even if you do the opposite, you are probably doing something that's worthwhile. If, instead of phonics, you use the much-reviled "whole language" approach, you probably, unless you are really out of your mind, will spend at least some time on grapheme-phoneme relationships, since it is totally obvious that those matter. And even if, instead of doing, as I would suggest, a lot of in-class storytime and independent reading, you spend your class time discussing a book that kids are supposed to read at home (and many won't), those kids will still probably read a little bit in class and will still hear everyone else discussing the book in class.
It is obvious that reading is good. It is obvious that the grapheme-phoneme relationship is fundamental to reading. It is obvious that learning new words is good. It is obvious that learning about the world is good. So it is not surprising that most teachers, in their classrooms, do at least some stuff that is useful. That may not be a very high bar--"do at least some stuff that is useful"--but it is high enough, along with the out-of-school factors, to mean that it is really, really hard to show that one particular change will make a significant difference.
What's the takeaway? Maybe we should be more modest and less certain of our rightness, and maybe we should be focusing more on what matters most?
For me, the fact that no particular change in practice can be shown to have "clear positive unambiguous impacts on student reading achievement" means not that we teachers shouldn't try to do a good job in our classrooms, nor that we shouldn't research and talk and write about the effects of different approaches to literacy, but that we should be more modest and understanding in our discourse. Over the last decade and a half, Bill Gates poured billions of dollars into education reform ideas that were founded, he thought, in solid "scientific" data, but all of which went absolutely nowhere. Gates money and influence has probably had a positive impact in other realms, like the fight against malaria (malaria has killed a large fraction of all humans ever to have lived, and yet between 2000 and 2015 deaths from malaria went down by 60%). Bill Gates should probably be focusing his efforts on public health, not education.
So maybe we too (and by "we" I mean "I") should be spending our time thinking and talking about other stuff--stuff like, for instance, climate change. Our planet is heating up, it's having major impacts on human life and well-being, and we should all be doing what we can to raise awareness of the problem and its potential solutions. I do hope to work on that more*, but I'm still an English teacher, so I will keep thinking about teaching and reading and writing; I will just try to do it, all the more, in a spirit of humility and good cheer. And I will keep reminding myself and others that a lot of what really matters is outside of the schoolhouse.
*Personally, I have tried to help by advising the Environmental Action Club at my school, by adopting a mostly vegetarian diet and talking about why I did it, by riding my bike to work and telling everyone else how convenient it is and how great it makes me feel, by putting solar panels on my house and telling everyone I know to do the same, by planning a switch to solar-driven electric heat pumps for heating and cooling and telling others how great this will be, by supporting housing and zoning reform that would allow more people to live in great walkable neighborhoods like mine, and by giving money to Environmental causes and political candidates who support them. But none of this is enough, and I should probably be spending my time thinking and writing about climate change rather than literacy education.
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